


go scratch your name into the clouds

by bullroars



Category: Justified
Genre: Abuse, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Explicit Language, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Pre-Canon, Recreational Drug Use, Sexual Content, Teenagers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-17
Updated: 2015-04-17
Packaged: 2018-03-23 10:23:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3764608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bullroars/pseuds/bullroars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>summer in harlan county, circa 1989.</p>
            </blockquote>





	go scratch your name into the clouds

**Author's Note:**

> So I am just. An absolute disaster area over this stupid fucking show. Just destroyed, honestly. This little piece was inspired by [this](http://murphycooper.tumblr.com/post/116480643108/karen-o-i-wish-they-would-do-a-prequel-to) text post, which I would pay legitimately all of my money to see. 
> 
> Title comes from the song "The Crooked Kind," by Radical Face. I listened to [this phenomenal kid!raylan](http://8tracks.com/spicebox/blood-to-gold) and [this phenomenal harlan county](http://8tracks.com/raylans/harlan-county) mix on loop while writing this, so shoutout to the awesome creators of those. This piece is only half-beta'd by Hemingway. I say half because it kept telling me to ditch all my adverbs and I refused. 
> 
> I am gonna miss these hillbilly shitheads SO MUCH.

go scratch your name into the clouds

 

i. The spring of his senior year, Raylan gets in a fight with one of the Crowder cousins because his mama and Aunt Helen have forbade him from picking any more with the Bennetts.

The fight goes pretty well for Raylan.  He gets a split lip and a black eye and a detention, but also ten dollars and the sympathy of some pretty girls, who fuss over his bruises and tell him how handsome he is when he's swinging punches. 

The teacher presiding over detention is also afraid of Arlo, on account of some unpaid debts owed to Bo Crowder, so he lets Raylan and the only other boy in detention sit with their feet kicked up on the desks and shoot the shit. 

"I hear you beat up my cousin Davey," the other boy says.  He's got his nose buried in a dog-eared copy of _The Sun Also Rises._ Raylan has been determinedly pretending not to know him since the other boy shambled in and flopped down in the chair next to him.

He does know him, of course.  Everyone knows Boyd Crowder, Bo's oldest son.  He's a senior like Raylan and they have history together fourth period, but they never talk.  Raylan doesn't like to hang around with people his daddy knows. 

"Gonna do somethin' about it?"  Raylan asks.  He's not trying to start another fight--his mama will kill him--but he's curious.  Boyd Crowder's an oddball.  Even Davey says so.  Raylan wants to know what he's made of. 

Boyd doesn't raise his head from his book.  "Likely not," he says.  "I'm gonna guess Davey had it comin'." 

"He did," Raylan agrees.  He adds, "Every time I see you, you've got your nose in a book."

"The more that you read, the more things you'll know," says Boyd dryly. 

"You did not just quote Dr. Suess at me."

Boyd finally looks up, surprised.  Raylan grins.  "Yeah, I can read too, asshole."  Raylan's tastes run more towards Dashiell Hammett and Stephen King than Hemingway, but still. 

"I am glad you have the reading skills of a second grader, Raylan Givens.  The Harlan County school system has not failed you." 

He's not trying to start something, Raylan decides.  He tangles his fingers together behind his head and shows Boyd all his teeth.  "That's me," he says.  "Regular ol' success story.  How 'bout you, Crowder?  What'd you do to end up here?  Can't imagine anybody'd pick a fight with _you."_

"You'd be surprised," Boyd says, returning to his book.  After a minute, he says, "I got caught playin' hooky.  Couldn't get off work."

"Work?"  Raylan leans forward, interested.  There ain't many opportunities for gainful employment for the young people of Harlan County, and Raylan will not work for his daddy, no matter how many hints Arlo tosses around. 

Boyd sighs and closes his book.  "I started at the mines last week.  Haven't managed to work out a good schedule yet." 

"Oh."  Raylan leans back again.  "How's that?" 

Boyd Crowder looks at Raylan, head tilted to the side a bit, like he's trying to get the measure of him.  He says, "Could show you, if you want."

Raylan starts working for Black Pike Coal two days later, and buys Boyd a glass of bourbon at Audrey's with his first paycheck. 

 

ii. Between work and the increasing tension at home, it is quite frankly a backwoods miracle that Raylan graduates high school.  Raylan doesn’t really see the point of going to class--it's boring, and even if it does get him away from his daddy for eight hours a day he could also do that at the mine and make some money while he's at it.  His mama is beside herself. 

It's Boyd who makes him stop skipping.  Boyd tells the day foreman to shoo Raylan away if he's trying to work during school hours, has Audrey run him out if she catches him skulking around, and has even taken to perching on top of Arlo's shitty truck so Raylan can't throw rocks at it while it's parked in front of the VFW between the hours of eight and four. 

"You wanna get outta here?"  Boyd demands, angrily.  Raylan shrugs.  He does, but that's not Boyd's business.  Unfortunately, as Raylan is fast discovering, Boyd delights in making things not his business his business regardless.  "You think you can get outta Harlan without even a goddamn GED?  You wanna dig coal your whole life?"

"I don't need a piece of paper," Raylan argues.  "I _need_ money.  And for Arlo to drop fuckin' dead."

"You don't mean that," Boyd scolds.  Raylan has a bruise on his ribs that disagrees, but that _definitely_ ain't any of Boyd's business, and anyway Boyd keeps going.  "Buck up and pull yourself together, boy.  Did your daddy graduate from high school?"

"No," Raylan says.  "Neither did your daddy."

"So we gotta get one up on 'em," Boyd reasons.  "Show your old man what you got."

That manages to get Raylan to show up to school four times out of five the last month and half of school, which is better than his mama and Aunt Helen managed, so Boyd also becomes something of a celebrity and a regular fixture at Raylan's house and spends many an afternoon eating all of Raylan's hidden snack food and pestering him to do his homework. 

When Raylan does graduate, and fourth in his class at that, shoddy attendance record notwithstanding, Boyd is understandably very, very smug.  Everyone is proud. Arlo, in a moment of almost fatherly affection, even gives Raylan his shitty truck. 

Raylan never does get any of the dents popped out. 

 

iii. Life settles into a good rhythm.  Work, sleep, work, sleep, Boyd, running wild around the county on their off days.  Raylan smashes fewer mailboxes and shows up to work with fewer bruises.  Boyd steals books from the library and hoards them in his lunchbox and his locker and the glove department of Raylan's truck like he's some kind of particularly literate squirrel. 

Raylan gets used to Boyd, the way he talks, the way he fights, the moods he gets in sometimes, staring out at the hills like he hates them and loves them at the same time.  Boyd, in turn, absorbs Raylan and all his failings into his life like they were always there. It's strange, but it's not strange, and Raylan doesn't care enough to look too hard at it either way.

It's a good time to be young, even in Harlan County. 

 

iv. In June, Raylan turns nineteen.  He's gone by the time he turns twenty, but at nineteen Boyd takes him over to Bennett County and sweet-talks Mags out of a jar of apple pie, and they get completely trashed out at one of the Crowder's hunting cabins. 

"How's it feel to be a big man now?"  Boyd says, sprawled comfortably against Raylan's side.  They're pressed up against each other from shoulder to hip, elbows tangled. 

"Ain't a big man 'til I'm gone for good," Raylan decides.  "Fuck, I can't wait to get out of here."

"That's true," Boyd agrees.  "You ain't a real man 'til the only meal your mama cooks for you is on Sundays."

"Shut the hell up, man, you eat my mama's cookin' more often than I do."

"Nobody in all of Appalachia makes fried chicken like your mama."

Boyd has been all over with his daddy.  Raylan is wildly, desperately jealous.  He's been to Bennett and Corbin, up to Lexington a few times to play ball and Louisville once for a bluegrass festival, but he wants to go to Virginia, down to Louisiana, out West where he hears there's not a hill for miles. 

"Come 'round for dinner this Sunday," Raylan says, instead of any of the hundred other things he's thinking.  Get me out of here.  Give me more of that pie.  My daddy's gonna kill me one day, or I'm gonna kill him, and then I'll be stuck here forever.  Get me out, get me out, get me out.  "I'll ask Mama to make some for you."

"Much obliged," Boyd says, eyes closed.  He's a warm and familiar pressure. 

They stay like that for a while until Dickie Bennett and his brother Coover turn up, having followed them up from Bennett, looking for trouble. 

"Fuck, Givens," Dickie crows, meanness in his little eyes.  He can finally walk without crutches.  When Aunt Helen heard that Raylan had crippled Mags' youngest boy, she had gone white as a sheet.  That night had been the only time she'd ever kicked Raylan out of her house, and the only time he had ever lied to her.  Raylan swore he hadn't meant to do it, that he wasn't proud of what he'd done.  He'd told Helen that thought Dickie was gonna take a bat to him, and he was just trying to make him stop.  She bought it, or appeared to, at least, and forgiven him after a few days. 

He had been sick to his stomach for days after, unable to look at himself in the mirror.

"You a queer now, Raylan?  What will your daddy say?"

Boyd sighs.  "Raylan?"

Raylan grins.  Boyd holds Dickie down, on account of the unfairness associated with beating on a cripple, while Raylan and Coover kick the shit out of each other.  In those days Coov was bigger than Raylan but slower, and at nineteen Raylan had some kind of mean in him that only a few years out of Harlan and Winona's hands managed to finally subdue. 

Coover ends up on the floor, and Raylan and Boyd saunter down the hill still drunk, singing at the top of their lungs, blood on Raylan's knuckles and the open collar of his shirt. 

Boyd stays right up against Raylan the whole walk home, his shoulder brushing Raylan's.  All in all, it's a good birthday. 

 

v. Raylan hates the mines.  Not Boyd, not the work, and definitely not the money (though Arlo starts charging Raylan "rent" in late June, citing that Raylan's "a man now, can't just expect a handout all his life"), but the dark, the closeness of it.  

He never feels more trapped than he does underground.  The mines are more Harlan than Arlo's fists, than Raylan's granddaddy's black lung, than Bo Crowder's bloody business.  Every time he goes down, he feels like he is never gonna leave Harlan.  Some part of him is gonna be stuck here forever.  Raylan hates the mines.  Hates them, hates them.

But it's Boyd who's _scared_ of them, who has a panic attack at the bottom of one, about three months after they start working together.  It happens like tornadoes happen, out of nowhere and all at once.

They're digging a ways away from the other men.  All older, sour guys who think it's perfectly acceptable to take the piss out of the two youngest. (A notion Raylan takes great and often creative pleasure in correcting.  The ringleader, Harris, has had to replace various fixtures around his place five times this month alone.) 

Boyd goes white suddenly.  His pick falls from his fingers and clatters to the ground.  His breath comes funny and his eyes get wild, staring. 

They are half a mile underground.  Raylan's not strong enough to carry him up to the surface, though he will try, if it comes to that.  He says, "Boyd?"

Boyd's breath is ragged, like he's dying, drowning on dry land.  He looks at Raylan like he has no idea who he is. 

Raylan doesn't know what to do.  Comforting people--his mama, his girlfriends, his cousins, anybody--is a little beyond him, but this is Boyd and no one else down here is going to help, so Raylan grabs Boyd by the shoulders and says, firmly, "Boyd."

Raylan doesn't know what his friend saw that had has him so shook up, but keeps saying Boyd's name quietly, keeps touching his wrists, his shoulders, until Boyd blinks and his choking breath slows and evens out. 

"C'mon," Raylan says, half-supporting Boyd back up, towards sunshine and clean air and open spaces.  "Stay with me now, c'mon."  The decent foreman's on, and he takes one look at Boyd and lets the pair of them pass. 

Boyd is mostly upright by the time they get to Raylan's battered truck.  Raylan bundles him in, keeps touching the inside of his wrist.

"You doin' alright?"  he asks. 

Boyd leans back against the seat, eyes closed.  "I don't wanna die down there," he says finally, very quietly.  "I don't wanna die somewhere I can't see the sun."

Raylan pulls his hand away and looks down at the steering wheel.  "Yeah," he says, "I get that."

 

v. There is a girl named Ava and she has a crush on Raylan, and Raylan figures this out because he's running from Doc Kear with five dollars' worth of stolen goods in his pockets (in order, three candy bars, a pack of gum, a can of Coke, and a fifty-cent cigar) and Doc Kear is right behind him, hollering fit to raise the dead, when a dainty little hand snags his and pulls him indoors. 

The door closes behind him with a snap and the owner of the hand, a pretty blonde girl Raylan's seen around a time or two, a few years younger than himself, smiles up at him and raises a finger to her lips. 

Doc Kear roars right past. 

"Thanks," says Raylan, looking down at the girl.  "Ava, right?"

"Don't mention it," she says back, shyly.  "What'd you do to get him so riled up?"

Raylan snorts.  "Nothin,'" he says.  "Just swiped some stuff.  He's bein' a real dick about it."  Ava blushes. He knows she's interested in him, can see it in her eyes, and maybe if he wasn't gonna leave as soon as he was able he'd be interested back, but he is going so he isn't interested.  Not like that, anyway.  Besides, she's three years younger than him.  He chews his lip. 

"You really did save me a thrashin,'" he says.  "Any way I can make it up to you?"

He expects her to ask for a kiss, or a date.  He does not expect  her to ask, still shy, "Is it true you and Boyd brought down an eleven-point buck two weekends ago?"

"Yeah," Raylan says, confused. 

"Could you teach me how to shoot?  My mama--my mama says I don't need to learn, but I want to."

Surprised, Raylan says, "Why not?"  Ava smiles and climbs into his truck, and they go out to that old Crowder cabin. 

It turns into one of the best afternoons he remembers.  When he gets married he forgets, in a way, like he forgets most of Harlan, but that afternoon has three of his favorite activities--shooting, flirting, and spending time the fuck away from Arlo--and Ava turns out to be a pretty good shot. 

Raylan teaches her how to handle a shotgun, how to cuss like a miner, how to spit chew, and in return Ava gives him her smiles, her teasing, and her triumphant shriek when she nails a battered tin can from five hundred yards.

They split the Coke, now warm, and two of the half-melted chocolate bars.  On the way home Ava grabs his bat and takes an impressive crack at Doc Kear's mailbox.  "His daughter Marcy's a huge bitch," she explains, and Raylan hoots with laughter all the way back to her place. 

Boyd and his younger brother are loitering outside the convenience store when Raylan drops Ava off.  She kisses him on the cheek, shy again, and heads back inside. 

"You got yourself a sweetheart," Boyd says, and there's something in his eyes that Raylan mislikes. 

"Nah," says Raylan. "Just payin' back a favor," and doesn't see Ava again until he's thirty-nine.  He remembers that afternoon like a warm feeling in the center of his belly, though, smooth as bourbon and bright with sunshine. 

 

vi. In July Boyd comes back from Bennet, where Raylan is no longer allowed, due to the beating he laid on Coover back in June, with a bag full of weed and a lighter. 

"Wanna have some fun?"  he says, grinning.

"Fuck," Raylan says, "yes."

They end up rolling joints up on the Black Spur, sitting in the bed of Raylan's truck and passing their joints back and forth. 

The weed goes down easier than cigarettes.  Raylan swiped a pack from Aunt Helen once, split it with Boyd, and couldn't stand them, spat the smoke back up and coughed until his eyes watered, which Boyd manfully never brings up again, but this Raylan smokes in deep, warm lungfuls, keeps it in as  long as he can, until he can feel his blood in his veins like he imagines a tide must feel and the wind kissing down his neck. 

Boyd lays out flat, looks up at the sky.  "Where do you wanna go?" he asks.  His voice is thick and slow. 

Raylan lays down beside him.  He's not in his body any more.  He's warm and loose and for once the wild, toothy thing he feels sometimes down in his belly far away.  "West," he decides.  "Somewhere warm.  Flat."

"I couldn't do flat," Boyd murmurs.  "I need these hills."

"I can do without 'em.  Where d'you wanna go?"

"'m thinkin' Virginia.  Tennessee, maybe."

"I could do Tennessee," Raylan says, before he realizes what he's saying, and what he means.  "What are you gonna do?"

"Anything," Boyd says.  "Everything."

"You should go to college.  Get you some higher learnin'."  Raylan bumps Boyd's shoulder.  "Mama wants me to go.  I ain't sure I'm smart enough."

"Fuh," Boyd snorts.  "You're plenty smart, you're just dog-lazy.  I could be a college man, I guess.  What say you, Raylan Givens? Go Wildcats?"

"Go Wildcats," Ryaln repeats, and laughs.  He likes the idea that's forming, him and Boyd in college, him and Boyd going south, leaving Harlan behind. 

"What do you wanna do?"  Boyd asks. 

Raylan has to think about it for a minute, his mind working slow.  "I always wanted to be a lawman," he says.  "Y'know, ride into town, clean up the bad guys.  It'd piss Arlo off, at any rate." 

"That it would," Boyd grins.  "That it would."  Very carefully, he takes Raylan's hand.  He tangles their fingers together.  The look on his face is hesitant and hopeful. 

Raylan looks down that their hands.  He should care, but he doesn't.  This is Boyd.  Their hands look right together, coal dust under their fingernails, callouses on their palms.  Boyd's knuckles are scarred from fighting just like Raylan's are.  Raylan likes girls plenty, but he feels too rough for them sometimes, too wild.  He doesn't feel wild around Boyd. 

He smiles widely, wider than he ever has, tucks his head under Boyd's chin, and stays. 

The sky is blue and wide above them, not a cloud in sight.  A pair of hawks circles around the sun. The mountain beneath them sings. 

After a while the sun begins to set and a chill creeps in, mountain wind whistling through Raylan's ragged flannel and curling around his bare feet.  Boyd rearranges them, tucks Raylan firmly against his chest, arms wrapped around him.  "Oh, the places we'll go," he says into Raylan's hair.

Raylan huffs.  "Quit quoting Dr. Suess at me, you sentimental idiot.  I'm too high for that."  He noses at Boyd's throat.  "Shut up and gimme your jacket, man, I'm freezin'."

Boyd laughs, and they stay like that until the moon is high in the sky.

 

vii. For the next few weeks, Raylan's world narrows to Boyd Crowder, to stolen kisses and nights on the Spur, to almost perfect harmony down in the mines and days spent running roughshod all over the county, singing at the top of his lungs, Boyd in the passenger seat right beside him.

It's not so much different loving a man, Raylan decides.  He likes that Boyd is hard in the places girls are soft, and he likes the drag of stubble down his jaw, Boyd's hand in his hair, his kisses, the way he fucks. 

Of course, it comes crashing down on them in the end, as most things in Harlan tend to do.  But it's good while it lasts. 

Lying there in the bed of his truck, counting their money, making plans together, it's good.  Raylan didn't even know he could imagine this big.  That he could be so happy. 

He kisses Boyd a lot, in those days.  Dirty and dangerous kisses, sure, but sweet ones too, if only to watch Boyd pull back and touch his thumb to the corner of his mouth.

"What was that for?"  Boyd asks. 

"I need a reason?"  Raylan grins.

Boyd smiles right back.  "No," he says, "I suppose you do not."

 

viii. The beginning of the end starts with Arlo.  He hasn't been around for a week or so, off running some scam or other, so Raylan's been spending a bit more time at home to show his mama that he really is doing alright.

And then Arlo comes home on a Tuesday night like a hurricane, flips over a chair, hurls Raylan's book-- _A Farewell to Arms,_ which Raylan has been reading on the sly to surprise Boyd, because he's apparently just as much of a lovestruck fool--out the window. 

Raylan is in the kitchen.  His mama is upstairs.  Raylan hears the start of rampage, hears Arlo thunder up, hears Frances start, "Arlo, now--" and then the sound of skin on skin.  Arlo's shouting obscenities, screaming at her, and something in Raylan bubbles up and drowns everything else out. 

He goes up after Arlo, shouting, and Arlo meets him at the top of the stairs.  Strategically not Raylan's best move, but he throws a punch anyway and catches Arlo on the lower jaw.  Gets one of his teeth, he later learns.

Arlo is harder to fell than an oak tree, though, shakes off Raylan's punch and tosses him down the stairs. It gets a little fuzzy after that. 

At some point, his mama hollers, shotgun aimed at Raylan's father.  He thinks he might black out for a minute, because when he wakes up Arlo's finally laid off him and Boyd is there, arm wrapped around Raylan's chest, half-dragging him towards the door. 

"Lemme go," Raylan slurs, spitting blood.  All he can see are Arlo's eyes with their nasty glitter and his mama's pale face, mouth pressed into a shaking line. 

"C'mon now," Boyd is saying, "let's get you outta here, boy, c'mon."

Raylan, for the first time, tries to throw Boyd off.  It turns out to be a mistake, 'cause he loses track of things again and then his Aunt Helen swims into view, touching his forehead. 

"Oh, Raylan," she says.  Boyd is still there, and Raylan hurts too bad to move.  He's angry, though, helpless with it.  He can taste it on the back of his teeth. There's shame, too.  Raylan is a man grown, now, and he can't even protect his mother.  

He closes his eyes and wishes everything would just go away.

 

ix. After that, it all goes to shit.  Raylan doesn't want Boyd touching him anymore.  Still lets Boyd fuck him, still fucks Boyd, but the joy's gone out of it.  Everything tastes like coal dust. 

By the middle of August Raylan is ready to go, can't stand being in his house, in Aunt Helen's, in the mines, anywhere, but Boyd keeps stalling.

"Come on," Raylan says.  "What're you draggin' your feet for?"

"Just a few more weeks," Boyd keeps insisting.  "Bowman's gotta stay in school.  It ain't fair for me to just fuck off and leave him stuck.  Ain't no place for a sixteen year old in a goddamn coal mine."

They do that dance awhile.  Raylan hoards his money, counts every dime, and Boyd gives more and more of his away. 

They fight about it, actually--Raylan calls Boyd a coward and Boyd calls Raylan a selfish bastard who wouldn't know the meaning of family ties if they jumped up and bit him on the fuckin' nose, so they throw down outside the mine.  It's a half-hearted fight.  Raylan keeps thinking about that night on the mountain top, about Boyd's hands, about his stupid fucking face and the way he says things, and Boyd looks to be thinking the same. 

But Raylan goes away with bloody teeth regardless, stalking stiff-legged back to his truck and leaving Boyd sprawled in the dirt. 

He figures he'll apologize in a day or two, but the next day the mine comes down around him and Raylan Givens is really, truly afraid for his life. 

Boyd saves him, that day.  Pulls him to the surface and drives him up to Black Spur, soothes the shaking out of his hands like Raylan did for him not too long ago.

They don't fuck.  Boyd kisses him, gently, and says he ought to get home and let his family know he's alright. 

Aunt Helen throws her arms around his neck and presses an envelope into Raylan's hands.  "Get out of here," she whispers.  "Go on now, get out of here.  Go be happy somewhere else." 

Sometimes (most times), Raylan wishes Arlo had just fucked off and gone to torment people somewhere else.  He wishes his mama and Aunt Helen had been his only parents.  He thinks, sometimes, that Helen wishes the same. 

"Where?" Raylan says. 

"Anywhere." Aunt Helen hugs him again, tightly.  "Go on, now." 

Raylan agrees.  Aunt Helen's given him enough to put himself up in a shitty long-stay hotel for a month.  He gets a job bussing tables at a dive bar the very next day, and starts his life over. 

Before he goes he says goodbye to his mama.  He waves to Ava in the street.  He catches sight of Boyd, playing football with his brother and his daddy, still smeared with coal dust, and wants to get out of the truck and go to him and stay.

The depth of the feeling scares Raylan.  He can still feel the ground shaking underneath him. 

He puts his truck in drive and heads north towards Lexington, and he forgets about Boyd Crowder and Harlan and mine collapses and how the stars look from Black Spur for twenty years. 

 

x. When Raylan is thirty-one, he apprehends a fugitive in a Barnes & Noble in Glynco and catches sight of a colorful Dr. Suess display. 

When he brings a copy of _Oh, The Places You'll Go_ home, Winona laughs and kisses along his jaw.  Some of his habits drive her absolutely crazy, but she says she likes his "whimsical nature," whatever that is, and Raylan gets distracted kissing back and leaves the book on the floor. 

He ends up propping it on his desk at work.  He likes the smell of it, how new and shiny it is, not dog-eared or battered, all of its pages there present and accounted for. 

Art gives him shit for it, and some of the other marshals look at him like's he's crazy, but Raylan just grins at them over his coffee cup and doesn't bother explaining.

That little book is the first thing he looks at every morning when he sits down to work, its bright colors, that little man on a mountain top, surrounded on all sides by a wide, blue sky.  


End file.
